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Our specialist Norwegian translators transfer all of the content while preserving the sense of the original and keeping the style appropriate to the translation’s target audience, giving you an accurate and authentic translation that looks like an original.

Modern technology also allows us to leverage previously verified sentences while keeping the technical terminology consistent in translation, giving our Norwegian translations at ConText® a consistent writing style. Our translators integrate your terminology requirements, comments and corrections in databases for further use in every project.

The Norwegian language – characteristics and spread

Norwegian belongs to the North Germanic branch of Indo-European languages. Norwegian is spoken by about five million Norwegians as their native language; most live in Norway, where it is the official language.

Norwegian has been standardised into four forms, of which have two currently have official status:

Bokmål ([bukmo:l], lit.: book language); Nynorsk ([ny:norsk], lit.: New Norwegian); Riksmål ([ri:ksmo:l], lit.: imperial language – a very conservative version of Bokmål more closely oriented to Danish, without official status; Høgnorsk ([Ho:gnorsk], lit.: High Norwegian – a very conservative version of Nynorsk more closely oriented to Ivar Andreas Aasen’s original standardisation, without official status)

Bokmål/Riksmål, often erroneously simplified to Norsk (Norwegian), is used as a written language by about eighty-five to ninety percent of Norway’s population; these two versions are not an original individual language, but partially adapted from Danish and are therefore offshoots of Danish. Riksmål is an unofficial language version similar to the more moderate Bokmål, but more committed to the Danish-Norwegian literary tradition and less heavily adapted from Danish than Bokmål.

Nynorsk has more in common with the West Scandinavian languages – such as ​​Faroese and Icelandic – than Bokmål, Danish and Swedish. Despite the prefix ny (new), Nynorsk (New Norwegian) is actually the older of the two official Norwegian language versions.

Høgnorsk is only maintained in very small communities.

The Nynorsk and Bokmål versions also have many elements that they share with Swedish. Norwegians, Danes and Swedes understand each other quite well, although Norwegians are better at understanding the other two linguistically than Danes and Swedes are at understanding each other. Norwegians also have a better starting point at learning Faroese or Icelandic. Similarities in vocabulary between Danish and Norwegian are estimated at around 95% compared to 85 to 90% between Danish and Swedish.

Norwegian originates from Old Norse, which is very similar to Icelandic. Middle Low German (Plattdeutsch) was the lingua franca of northern Europe during the Hanseatic period, and many words from Low German have been integrated as loanwords.

Nynorsk is used as the official language in 27% of all Norwegian communities where a total of 12% of the total population lives; around half of the remaining municipalities use Bokmål as their official language, and the other half do not have a declared official language between the two, which in practice means that they default to Bokmål.

The language agreement in the Nordic Council ensures that Danish and Swedish are permitted in official correspondence on a mutual basis.